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Putting Injuries Behind Him, Jermain Taylor Fights On

Jermain Taylor, right, during his comeback bout against J. C. Candelo on Dec. 14. Taylor won with a knockout in the seventh round of his first fight in 14 months.Credit
Tom Hogan/Hoganphotos

SAN ANTONIO — It was about 4 p.m. at a cavernous Alamodome that, in only a few hours, would hold 11,000 screaming boxing fans. But at this moment, in the middle of a Saturday afternoon in December with the sun still shining and the television cameras turned off, Jermain Taylor entered the ring for a bout for the first time in 14 months. If the approximately 200 fans who had filtered into the arena by that point recognized Taylor from his past, they did not act like it.

When Taylor knocked out the journeyman J. C. Candelo in the seventh round of their fight on Dec. 14 the buzz in the arena was nearly nonexistent. Taylor’s was the second fight on a big card, and his bout — a fight, mind you, that in Taylor involved a former undisputed middleweight champion who had twice beaten Bernard Hopkins — was not seen on television.

Taylor won the fight. He celebrated. He left the ring. And almost immediately afterward, the boxing world focused on something else.

This is where Taylor finds himself these days. This is what happens when a 35-year-old — who was knocked out twice in terrifying fashion by world-class super middleweights in a six-month stretch, who sustained a brain bleed that should have made him consider hanging up his boxing gloves forever — makes a comeback against long odds.

He is placed in the second row of the news conference dais, next to the boxers who are just beginning their careers and behind the big stars of the fight card. His quotations from that news conference are not distributed to the news media, because he is not fighting on TV. He becomes nearly as irrelevant as his competition, Candelo, the handpicked opponent that Taylor was fighting.

Why do it, then? Why subject yourself to more head blows, more punches to the face, the indignity of the back row? By all accounts, Taylor does not need the money. Why is he bothering?

“Man, what else am I supposed to do?” Taylor said a few minutes after dispatching Candelo.

A shrug of the shoulders.

“That’s what I’m saying,” he said. “I have nothing else to do. I’ve been doing this job since I was 12. This is my life. When I took those years off, I sat back and thought about it: ‘What am I supposed to do?’ ”

That was not the only question Taylor needed to answer as he began his journey back to relevancy. Taylor, a 2000 Olympic bronze medalist, also had to prove he was healthy enough to resume what had been an impressive career that included holding all four major middleweight belts at the same time.

But by 2009, he was coming off two losses to Kelly Pavlik — including one by knockout — and Taylor moved from the 160-pound middleweight class to the 168-pound super middleweight limit to challenge for Carl Froch’s world title. Although Taylor was ahead on two of the three judges’ scorecards, Froch knocked out Taylor with 14 seconds left in the 12th round. Six months later, Arthur Abraham brutalized Taylor in the final round with one punch that felled Taylor as if he had just stepped off a cliff. Only six seconds remained in that bout when it was stopped.

After the fight, Taylor asked his wife, Erica, and his promoter, Lou DiBella, in what round he had been stopped. He asked again a few minutes later. And again a few minutes after that. That was when Taylor’s team knew something was wrong, and soon after, Taylor, who had a brain bleed and a concussion, temporarily stepped away from the sport. His health, he knew, was at stake.

“I’ve seen a guy who I was with at the Olympics training camp, and he can’t even talk now,” Taylor said. “His brain swelled up, and his speech was slurred. I don’t want to be like that. But he chose his sport. I chose this sport. And I love it.”

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So he called his former trainer Pat Burns, who was fired during Taylor’s original middleweight title run, to see if they could work together again.

“No, no, no,” Burns said. Taylor flew to Miami to persuade him. Burns wanted Taylor to undergo neurological tests before he would commit to working with him. Taylor said he had been tested in his home state, Arkansas, but Burns still was not convinced the fighter was fit for a return.

Instead, Burns persuaded Taylor to visit the Mayo Clinic. He sent him to the Cleveland Clinic, and the stringent Nevada Athletic Commission. All three cleared Taylor to fight. “We’re ready to go, right?” Burns said an eager Taylor had asked him after the testing was complete. “Nope,” Burns said. “We’re going to take another six months off.”

Burns knows about bad concussions. A Marine, he sustained a head injury during a tour in Vietnam. As he recovered in a hospital for the next year, Burns saw the positive effects rest could have on a head injury. He made sure Taylor would have plenty of rest — 26 months of rest, in fact.

“The thing that’s important is he had two years off,” Burns said. “Unlike the N.F.L., where these guys get knocked out in the first quarter of the game, and if they’re coherent, they come back in the third quarter, the rest did Jermain good. Allow him to rest, he’ll be fine. If you continue to pound the bruised area, you’ll never recover. Whatever the damage was, he had more than enough time to heal.”

More than anything, Burns repeats the same mantra: it took us 24 fights, about four and a half years into Taylor’s career, to be good enough to beat Hopkins for the first time in 2005; It will take us some time now to get back to the championship level.

Taylor’s comeback attempt has not been smooth. He had three convincing wins from December 2011 to October 2012, but he was knocked down by Caleb Truax in a bout that mirrored the ending sequence of the Abraham fight. Taylor got up and won, but a confidence builder it was not.

In May 2012, a woman in Little Rock, Ark., accused Taylor of rape, and though she later recanted her story, the married Taylor admitted to ESPN.com this month that he had a relationship with the woman, whom he called a longtime friend.

But after 14 months out of the ring, his performance against Candelo was the best he has looked in his comeback. Until Taylor faces a truly dangerous opponent, however, nobody — not Taylor and certainly not Burns — knows how he will react.

“Very few boxers get a second chance,” Burns said. “He is getting a second chance. If you don’t cherish the moments and the hard work you’re going to do, you need to quit.”

But Burns also adamantly points out that if he continues to work hard and progress, Taylor will win another world title.

Maybe by then, Taylor, once again, will be allowed to sit in the front row.

A version of this article appears in print on December 23, 2013, on Page D4 of the New York edition with the headline: The Middleweight Jermain Taylor Has Put Serious Injuries Behind Him and Fights On. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe